help!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hi Nate,

It takes time for new sites to be picked up by search engines, and there's no guarantee that you'll show up for the searches you want to. There are however, things you can do to increase your ranking.

Search engines like Google show users the sites that they think the users will find useful. The most important things you can do to get your site indexed is to update your content frequently and get other related sites to link to your site. If users like your site enough to post a link to it, search engines begin to trust your site a little more. This also applies to visitors - the more visitors you have, the more likely search engines are to send other visitors to you. While many users have achieved good search engine rankings with a SynthaSite subdomain, using a custom domain name will make it easier for users to remember and revisit your site.

You can submit your site to Google through a program called Google Webmaster Tools. We have posted a tutorial that walks you through the steps to do so http://www.yola.com/tutorials/google-... When you submit your site, it's a matter of sitting back and waiting for Google's crawlers to reach your site. This could take as little as a few days, or as long as a few months. Unfortunately, this is out of our control.

You can also add tags to your pages to tell search engines what your site is about. These are key words which will help search engines identify your site. In the properties sidebar for each page you will see a field labeled "Keywords". Type your tags in there - your location, your business, what you offer etc. This is the place to put the sorts of things you'd expect people to be typing into search engines to find you.

You should also add a description into the "Description" field - this should be a sentence or two describing your site. An example of a description would be "The Quick & Easy Website Builder that Requires NO Technical Skills and offers free website hosting."

The "Window Title", which will become the title tag, is what shows up at the top of a browser when viewing your page, it will also be the text Internet users will click on in the search engine results pages (SERPS) to get to your site. An example of a title tag would be "ABC Store - Affordable Custom Widgets - Austin, Texas".

Here is a link to another tutorial that gives you some more tips on attracting visitors: Promoting your Website - http://www.yola.com/tutorials/promoti.... We also have a thread in our forum with more information: SEO with Yola - http://getsatisfaction.com/SynthaSite...

If you're a small business or affinity group, you may want to have a professional help get traffic to your site. Some businesses on Yola have found it useful to work with an SEO (search engine optimization) company to improve their rankings and reach visitors. If you'd like to do so, we suggest speaking with our partner http://www.inlocal.com/?kbid=4268&m=20

If you want to see who is visiting your site, we suggest that you install Google Analytics. Here's how to do it:

1. Go to Google Analytics - https://www.google.com/analytics/ and sign up for a free account.
2. Type in the URL of your site.
3. Copy the verification code provided by Google.
4. Go to Yola and drag and drop a HTML widget at the bottom of each page you want to track.
5. Paste the code from Google into the HTML editor on each page.
6. Republish your site.

Your site will then be verified and you can log into your Google Analytics account to find out all the information you want to know about the people who have visited your site.

I hope some, or all, of the above is helpful to you. Now that your site is built and published you have taken the first big step towards having an online presence. From now on you should focus on developing and updating your site, and doing as much as you can to promote your site and attract visitors. It can seem like a slow process, and it is a challenge for all website owners, but anything you do towards this will help in the end.

Hi Nate,
You can also check out our SEO tutorials which will be helpful as well, they are towards the bottom of the list of tutorials: Yola Tutorials.

Kind Regards,
Emmy